y tools together, and then to decide whether I should have a
reasonable chance of success."

"Promise me that I shall help?" she insisted.

"I promise that you shall have the opportunity."

She rose from her chair and settled down in a corner of the settee.
With a little half-conscious gesture she invited him to take the place
by her side.

"Do you know," she said, "that you are making life much more
endurable for me?"

"You should never believe it unendurable," he told her firmly.
"Whatever one has suffered, and however dreary the present, there is
always the future."

"I wonder," she murmured. "In this life or the next?"

"In this one," he answered.

"Are you, by the by, a believer in anything beyond?" she went on.

"A struggling one," he replied. "I have wanted so much to believe that I
think I have at times almost succeeded."

"I believe," she said reflectively, "but I cannot analyse my belief. I am
most content when I keep my brain shut off from it and consider it as an
instinct. I try to tell myself that the power which is responsible for
the sorrows of this world must provide compensation. Even history can
show us that this has always been the case. Yesterday," she continued, "I
went to a spiritual seance. I found nothing. I shall go to the next thing
of the sort which any one suggests. I am like the hypochondriac with his
list of patent medicines. I try them all, but my heart still aches."

"I think," he admitted, "that _au fond_ I have, like most men, a strong
leaven of materialism in me. I have had my disappointments in life. I
want my compensations here, in the same world where I have suffered."

"Why should we not try to believe, like La Fontaine," she questioned,
"that sorrow and unhappiness are akin to disease, a mental instead of a
physical scourge--that it must pass just as inevitably?"

"It is a comfortable philosophy," he confessed. "Could you adopt it?"

"In my blackest moments I should have scoffed at the idea," she replied.
"One thing I know quite well, though, is unchanging," she continued, her
face losing all the gentle softness which a moment before he had found so
fascinating, so reminiscent of those sad, sleepy-eyed women immortalised
by the masters of the Renaissance. "That is my hatred of everything and
everybody connected with my present life."

"Everybody?" he murmured.

She stretched out her hand impulsively. He held it in his with a tender,
caressing clasp. There seemed